Unscrewed

by Lois Greiman

  My arms were getting sore from holding Harlequin at bay. My brain had been sore for weeks. “Resentment toward…your son?”

  “He was very young when he dated her. Perhaps he was less than sensitive when he discontinued their relationship,” he said, but he had paused just a moment too long before answering and my mind had finally clicked a couple puzzle pieces into place.

  “Or resentment toward you?”

  He tilted his head and gave me the shadow of a smile. “Perhaps she feels some bitterness by association alone.”

  “Or because you slept with her just to make Salina jealous?”

  For a moment he was absolutely silent, then he spread his hands in a gesture of defeat. “She was at a fund-raiser in D.C.,” he said. “I had not seen her for some years. It is no excuse, this I know, but Salina and I were having difficulties at the time.”

  Holy crap! He was like a five-legged dog in a mosh pit. “Was it Rachel who told you Salina was seeing someone else?”

  He drew a deep breath, looking suddenly older. “I loved Salina. That you can believe.”

  I watched him. “Did you know, Senator, that is the one statement most commonly made by abusive men?”

  “I did not kill my fiancée.” His eyes looked earnest and solemn. “But perhaps it was my philandering that caused the death of any chance of a happy marriage. I am willing to take the blame.” He raised his chin like a martyr ready for the blaze. It made me want to slap him upside the head. “God knows, I made mistakes.”

  You think? I scoffed, but I was lucid enough to keep the words to myself.

  “But please, Christina, do not judge me too harshly.” He gave me a sliver of the charismatic smile that had gained him a seat in the Senate, and probably a place in a hundred women’s beds. “I would not want the lady who may be my future daughter-in-law to think poorly of me.”

  I raised my mental brows. What was he trying to do? Bribe me with his son? Or was it his own fortune he thought I might find appealing? I glanced toward the street. His Town Car stretched halfway to the bank. Okay, it was kind of appealing. “What was your business in Boston?” I asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “When Salina was killed,” I said, “you were on your way to Boston, weren’t you?”

  He was silent again, perhaps wondering how I knew. “Wellesley, to be specific.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  He watched me in silence for a moment, then, “There is a progressive pharmaceutical company breaking new ground out East. They wished for my opinion since I am a major shareholder.”

  “Breaking new ground on balding scalps?” I asked.

  He smiled again. “I am impressed, Christina. Truly I am.”

  Uh-huh. So they were all in bed together—Hohls, Riveras, Peachtrees. But what, if anything, did that have to do with Salina? My mind was spinning, but I kept my tone light, lest he know I was ferreting out his secrets like a rat terrier. “So will we be eradicating the awful baldness epidemic in the near future?”

  There was laughter in his eyes. Once again, he looked handsome and confident and mildly amused. I found myself hoping that when I died I left someone behind who was better at this mourning business than he was. “We shall see.”

  “No promises?”

  “Not just yet, no. But in truth, I had another reason for stopping by this morning.”

  “Another reason?” I braced myself.

  “It concerns my son.”

  “What about him?”

  His expression was solemn again. “There has been some trouble.”

  I was holding on to the doorjamb. “What happened?”

  “He is not injured.”

  I drew a careful breath and eased my grip on the rotting wood. “What, then?”

  His lips curled up a little. “Christina, I cannot tell you how it warms my heart to see that you care so—”

  “What the hell happened?” I snapped.

  His brows shot up. “They took Gerald’s badge.”

  So Hohl had been correct.

  “Not many know of this. Captain Kindred is keeping it as quiet as—”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. “There may be several reasons. Officer Graystone alleged that Gerald attacked him the night of Salina’s visitation.”

  Holy crap. My gaze wandered dizzily down the street.

  “But you need not feel guilty about calling nine-one-one.”

  I snapped my attention back to his face.

  “You see, you are not the only one who has little-known information, Christina.”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Cause trouble for him? No, I am sure you did not. But Gerald…” He closed his eyes for a second. “He is difficult to understand at times.”

  I nodded dumbly.

  He smiled, his face grim. “He broke into my house.”

  “What?”

  “I was not there at the time. I am certain he was searching for clues,” he added quickly. “Attempting to determine what happened on that dreadful night. But there are others who believe he may have been trying to destroy evidence.”

  “Holy shit.”

  He reached for my hand. I was in a haze and let him take it. “So you see, my son needs you now more than ever. Please, you must do what you can to put his mind at ease. I am certain a woman of your quality knows just how to do this.”

  I stared at him, boggled. Was he talking about sex? Or was that just the way my mind worked?

  “It has been a pleasure seeing you again,” he said, skimming his thumb across my knuckles. Then he walked away, straight as a pool cue, and maybe as guilty as hell.

  I agonized over the senator’s words for days, but I didn’t call Rivera. Maybe I was a chicken shit, but what was I supposed to say? “Hey, pal, heard you’ve been suspended from the job that gives your life meaning. Sucks, huh?” It didn’t sound great. Besides, my mind was reeling. Why would Rivera break into his father’s house? If it was merely to prove his innocence, wouldn’t it have been practical to simply ask his old man for admittance? Despite what I wanted to believe, I had to accept the possibility that Rivera might be guilty. Or maybe the senator was responsible for Salina’s death and was slanting the evidence against his son. Or perhaps…A dozen other scenarios chased themselves through my mind.

  By Wednesday I felt certifiable, but I kept seeing clients and shuffling through the applicants who showed up for Laney’s job. The most likely contender had a two-pack-a-day habit and refused to work before noon.

  By Friday night I felt harried and edgy.

  Eddie Friar looked Kansas clean and pretty as a pony standing beneath the glaring orange lights of the Strip Please club.

  “You came,” I said, and leaned in for a hug.

  “Of course I came.” Wrapping his corded arms around me, he gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.

  He smelled yummy. But Eddie always did, even when I’d first met him just weeks after moving to L.A. Cavorting with his greyhound on Topanga Beach, he’d looked as rugged as the sculpted landscape behind him and as windswept as the waves. He’d smiled when I’d handed back the Frisbee he’d tossed out for his dog, and I’d been lost.

  We’d dated for a while. Long enough to learn he loved animals, good food, and…oh, men. Still, I sometimes wonder if we shouldn’t have tried harder to work things out, even if he is as gay as a songbird. What’s sex compared to a guy who talks baby talk to a race hound and can cook like a cruise line Frenchman?

  He eyed the dark door. To say this was a seedy part of town would have been overly kind. “I couldn’t let you come here alone.”

  “It had nothing to do with L.A.’s premier strippers, then?” I had checked their website…for a while.

  “I’m insulted,” he said, and grinned as he leaned past to open the door for me. Call me the Benedict of the feminist movement, but I still like it when men do that. And when they touch the small of your back as they usher you along. “Then again, i
f we see someone interesting, we can arm wrestle for him.”

  “Please!” I said, managing quite nicely to sound offended. I had dated a dancer once. He’d had enough muscle to sink the Titanic. Most of it had been firmly packed in his cranium, sharing space with an ego the size of Mount Whitney. “What I don’t need is some steroid-popping behemoth in my life.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” He ushered me inside…with a hand on my back. Sigh. “You have a Ph.D.”

  I gave him a look over my shoulder. Eddie has a doctorate in Marine Biology and a bachelor’s in Zoology. Eddie could think me under the table.

  “I’m just here to find Manderos,” I said.

  “Just dumb luck that he’s a guy who likes to take off his clothes, then,” he mused, but I honestly didn’t know what kind of guy Manderos was. Laney hadn’t exactly been a fount of information. And I’d discovered zippo about him on the Internet. Which could mean any number of things, but most probably indicated my lack of technological ability.

  As for Eddie, he and I hadn’t had much time to discuss things on the phone. I’d said, “Male revue,” and he’d said, “I’m in.” Short and…well, a little disturbing maybe. I mean, there had been a time I thought Eddie was the one with whom I’d share the fortune cookie of my future—smart, kind, good-looking. It was one of life’s cruel jokes that we were about to sit side by side and watch a bunch of greased gorillas take off their clothes.

  The place was dark, loud, and packed. We ordered drinks at the bar and carried them to one of the tiny tables placed in rows around the stage.

  At ten o’clock an emcee greeted us. Ten minutes later, the first performer appeared. He was dressed as a police officer. It was a disgusting display of male exploitation that offended the fine-tuned therapist in me. On the other hand, my internal cocktail waitress wasn’t quite so prissy and couldn’t help wondering how Rivera would look in breakaway pants. The image made me feel itchy. By the time the fourth dancer took the stage, I felt like a time bomb, armed and ready. I squiggled uncomfortably in my chair.

  Eddie gave me a beatific smile. The psychologist scowled back. The cocktail girl was busy panting.

  He leaned closer. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  I rolled my tongue back into my mouth like an overheated Labrador. “Fine,” I said, and took a casual sip of my margarita. Had I been thinking properly, I would have just dumped the damn thing in my lap.

  We’d been discussing the attributes of the various dancers. So far, I hadn’t tried to wrestle Eddie to ground…or any of the other guys, either, but one look at the fellow called Clifton made me wonder how much longer that kind of disciplined civility was going to last.

  He was tall for a Latino, with sleek black hair that was caught at the nape of his neck and fell over the collar of his white poet’s shirt. He wore a tricorn hat, buff-colored breeches tucked into knee-high leather boots, and a gold hoop in his right ear. Sail ho, maties. He was a pirate.

  “What about him?” Eddie asked.

  Clifton had just taken off his hat. His eyes were black as a demon’s; his smile, little-boy mischievous. “He’s okay,” I said, and reminded myself to breathe.

  The music thrummed on.

  Eddie was staring at me. “I meant…could he be Manderos?”

  Onstage, Clifton slipped his shirt off his shoulders and skimmed splayed fingers down his abs. They rippled like a washboard. Take me, laddie, I’m dirty.

  “Rivera’s double?” Eddie reminded me.

  “Oh.” I snapped back to business. It wasn’t that I had forgotten my purpose for being there. But holy crap, this guy was buttered up like a hot cross bun. Slap a little frosting on him and he’d be a diabetic’s worst nightmare. “I know that,” I said, then scowled and looked closer. Clifton was probably about the right height, though it was hard to say for sure, what with the gyrating. Somehow he had managed to remove his boots. The breeches followed. I swallowed. He had an ass like a…well, like a frickin’ stripper. But truth be told, I wasn’t sure how the senator’s ass looked with a thong the width of dental floss separating him from a night in lockup. Of course, I could imagine, but…I cleared my throat and tried to do the same with my thoughts. “He’s too young. Don’t you think?”

  Eddie shrugged. “I’ve never seen the good senator.”

  I turned toward him. “What?”

  He flashed me a grin. “Hey, I’m just here to keep the guys off you.”

  I snorted. There were a couple hundred women in there. If one of these men was crazy enough to want to get to me, he’d have to go through every last slavering one of them. “You must have seen Rivera’s picture,” I said.

  “If I did, I don’t remember it.”

  “Fat lot of help you—” I began, but just then the thong disappeared. He still wasn’t completely naked, though. What the hell was young Clifton doing with that eye patch? My eyebrows rocketed, racing my respiration and my estrogen level. But I kept my voice steady. “He could be Rivera himself and you wouldn’t—”

  “I think we’ll have to question him.”

  “What?”

  I didn’t bother to look at him. The eye patch was kind of mesmerizing.

  “How else are we going to learn anything?”

  “What about his admirers?” I asked, and nodded disjointedly toward the audience. “Most of them are younger, thinner, and drunker than I am.”

  “Yeah, but where are they on the desperation scale?”

  I smirked in his general direction. Never turn your back on a pirate.

  “I’m just kidding,” he said. “I bet you can bring him over here.”

  “Who?” I yanked my attention from the eye patch. An influx of adrenaline had squeezed my heart up tight in my throat by the time I motioned toward the stage. “Him?”

  “Yeah.”

  I laughed. It sounded like an ass on nitrous oxide. “’Fraid I’m fresh out of million-dollar—” I began, but Eddie was already pressing a piece of paper into my hand.

  I glanced down. It was a hundred-dollar bill. My lungs joined my heart in my esophagus. “Are you serious?”

  “You’re the one who thinks her boyfriend’s a cold-blooded murderer. Time to find out for sure. Fish or cut bait. Shit or get off the pot. Screw him or screw him. Cut the bull or turn him loose with—”

  “Okay!” I snapped my gaze to him. He was still grinning. I tightened my fist around the bill and tried to marshal my brain cells into some kind of coherent order. “What do I do now?”

  He shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me.”

  “Tempting,” I said.

  He laughed. “Put it on the table and let kismet do its thing.”

  “Kismet?”

  He nodded.

  I set the bill beside my drink.

  The volume picked up. Clifton was doing some kind of bumping grind and the crowd was working itself into a preorgasmic frenzy.

  By the time he was standing on his hands, I felt a little light-headed.

  Two tables away, a waitress wriggled through the mob, looking harried. Eddie picked up the hundred and flagged her down. She shimmied over and leaned close. I couldn’t hear him over the man-thirsty mob, but when the two of them lifted their gazes to me, I was pretty sure of the direction of their conversation. I willed myself not to blush—when pigs eat Lean Cuisine.

  The waitress shrugged, took the money, and moved away.

  “I was thinking kismet was something a little more nebulous,” I shouted. And Eddie laughed. Fifteen minutes later, the show came to a grinding, ear-shattering halt. I studied the crowd, but if the senator’s body double was there, he was either female, gay, or a twenty-something stripper stuffed to the gills with steroids. The mob was beginning to dissipate and Clifton hadn’t appeared to tell me how he had flown to Boston so Senator Rivera could kill his fiancée.

  I stood up, feeling foolish…and as horny as a teenage tuba player.

  Eddie grabbed my sleeve. “Where you going?”

  The volume had
decreased but still held a pretty good beat. “There’s got to be a better way.”

  He snagged my sleeve and pulled me down beside him. “What about kismet?”

  “Kismet, my ass. I—” I began, but in that instant, a man appeared beside Eddie. I glanced up. He was dressed in a white shirt and black trousers, but I was pretty sure I’d be able to pick Pirate Man out of a crowd for the rest of my coherent life. I took a deep breath and shrank back down. Almost missing my chair, I teetered for a moment, then slid into place.

  “Hi. I’m Clifton. Patricia said you wanted to see me.”

  I was staring openmouthed. Eddie dug his elbow between my ribs.

  “Yes. Yes, I…Yes,” I said.

  I could feel Eddie’s rumbling laughter close beside me. He thrust me away a couple inches, rose to a half-erect position, and extended his hand. “I’m Eddie Friar.” They shook. “This is Christina.” Clifton’s fingers engulfed mine but finally our hands parted. I didn’t know what to do next. Speech was out of the question and I was afraid I’d get trampled if I fainted.

  “Do you have a minute?” Eddie asked.

  “Sure.” Clifton’s voice was a hormone-sluicing rumble. He took the seat across from me. I glanced at him and shot my gaze away. My face felt as hot as a radiator.

  Silence misted around us.

  “Great show,” Eddie said finally.

  The pirate was watching me with eyes like glowing faggots. I was blushing down to my short hairs, secretly living out a scene in a romance novel I’d read when I was thirteen. I don’t remember the title, but it was about a pirate and a virgin. I think it was called The Pirate and the Virgin. Romance novels aren’t always subtle. “How about you, Christina?” he asked. “What’d you think of the show?”

  I tried to talk, but the scoundrel had tied the virgin to the yardarm and was torturing her with unrelenting kisses down her midline. Those pirates…

  “Did you like it?” he prompted.

  I blinked. Eddie gave me another elbow in the ribs.

  “Aye…Aye…” I could feel the two of them staring at me. Was I talking pirate-speak? “Yes.” I was starting to sputter a little, maybe because of the excess saliva. “It was…” For a while I think he’d tortured her with the nine-inch handle of a cat-o’-nine-tails. And then they’d buried his treasure. “…nice.”